SLOVAK ELITE – Statistics of Juniors

By Daniel Kysel

January 2nd, 2000

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While Slovak Elite (Extraliga) has a Christmas break, Slovak national team under 20 struggles against very good teams in Group A, with scoring misery as well as with fever epidemic. Coach of national team Dusan Zizka nominated 12 players form CHL – one goalie, three defensemen and eight forwards. It looked like the team had very strong offence but reality is completely different. Team cannot score. If you know a mentality of Slovaks you can be sure that first game against Czechs influenced other performance of national team. Failure of Slovak team is not such surprise for me. I remember 9th place of Slovaks on JWC 1998 as well as Zizka’s interview full of alibism before start of JWC in Sweden. Bronze medal team was coached by Jan Filc (actually he is coach of national senior team) on last year championship. Zizka did not learn anything from Filc. By the way, do you know who coached team two years ago? You right, Dusan Zizka. In that time national team had to save Pool A only after two victories over very weak German team and finally earned 9th place. As we can see Mr. Zizka leads the team to the same “success“ or to Pool B.

I wish to call your attention to other parallel. On JWC 1998 Slovak team had big troubles to score although Marian Hossa, Ladislav Nagy, Stan Gron, Andrej Podkonicky etc. were in line-up.

O.K. I am very sarcastic but I was not any optimist either week ago. Do you remember Jes?

Let us to check stats of juniors on Slovak Extraliga. You can find stats of selected players. But as first let’s see actual standings:

Some of above youngsters sweat their jerseys of national team under 20 – Krizan, Kolba, Harabin, Urban, Devecka, Starosta, Gaborik, Kopecky. Other kids were nominated but due to arrival of CHL players they did not get into roster -Nadasdi, Jasik, Kristian and others.Besides above players there are few good prospects on Division 1.

Martin Zajac(MHC Nitra) – robust D-man, played 3 games in Extraliga’s Trencin. Trencin’s general manager has eminent interest to see Zajac skating in yellow-red jersey of Trencin.

Roman Kukumberg(04/08/1980 –6’2” 193 lb. – MHC Nitra) left his mother team Danubia Bratislava (bankruptcy of team) and moved 50 miles eastern direction to Nitra. He has good size and performance.

Although North America is hockey Eden for young Slovaks – 9 kids on WHL, 6 kids on OHL, 9 kids on QMJHL as well as 5 kids on USHL and many others in the NAHL, AWHL, OPJHL etc. Some kids try to succeed in other European Elite leagues: